Medical School NERD Scale

Genius! Test to see how much of a medical nerd you are.
Add a point to every sentence that applies to you.

1. You have ever said “Netter is god”. Yes
2. You can discuss autopsy/ anatomy over a meal. Yes
3. You own a 4 color pen Yes
4. -it just isn’t enough colors for you Yes
5. You use more than one color to take notes Yes
6. You have use up more than 6 highlighters in the past 6 months
7. you have ever highlighted something YOU wrote Yes
8. you retype handouts given in class
9. you haven’t had a date in 3 months Yes
10. you haven’t had a date since entering med school Yes
11. you have not been able to remember the normal term for something because you were thinking of the medical term (ie reflux for heartburn) Yes
12. You get more sleep in lecture than at home
13. You know the correct spelling for pruritus Yes
14. -you also know what it means Yes
15. You have ever asked a question in class Yes
16. -The prof. didn’t understand the question
17. -you didn’t believe the answer the prof. gave Yes
18. -you went to look it up to see if they were right Yes
19. You can’t hold a conversation on anything other than med school
20. You skip class to study Yes
21. You’ve said you didn’t do well on a test on which you beat the mean Yes
22. You spend more than 15 hrs a week on e-mail
23. You have a callous on you finger from writing Yes
24. More than one professor knows you by name Yes
25. When you ask a question, a new professor has said “Oh, I’ve heard of you”
26. You can name more amino acids than past presidents Yes
27. You use more than 5 acronyms an hour when talking
28. you actually know what PERRLA stands for Yes, pupil equal round reactive to light and accommodation
29. You know all the steps of the TCA cycle Yes
30. You do not read PTA as parent teachers association Yes, prior to admission
31. You can remember the muscles in the forearm Yes
32. You know the structures in the urea cycle
33. You know the dermatome distribution Yes
34. You can’t remember what you had for breakfast Yes
35. You can’t spell world, much less backwards Yes
36. You’ve ever been sexually aroused by the breast shadow on an X-ray
37. You equate “morning stiffness” with Rheumatoid Arthritis Yes, and pregnancy
38. You actually know normal values for plasma Na
39. -K
40. Missing class causes you extreme stress Yes
41. You have seriously asked someone “So how does that make you feel?” Yes
42. You have asked will this be on the exam Yes
43. -Just after the prof. said it wouldn’t
44. You identify with Deb on E.R.
45. You have made a medical joke Yes
46. -no one laughed Yes
47. -You figure they just weren’t that far in their studying Yes
48. You wear your stethescope around your neck on the bus
49. -you don’t even know which way the thing goes in your ears Yes
50. “SOB” means short of breath to you Yes
51. You have gone to student health with suspicion of a disease you have studied Yes
52. -within 3 days of the lecture
53. You have answered a question in class Yes
54. -asked by the professor Yes
55. -it was a rhetorical question
56. You can quote lines from the movie “Malice” Yes
57. -you believe them Yes
58. You can flip your pen over your thumb Yes
59. -with both hands
60. -you do so throughout class Yes
61. You have corrected a professor in class
62. -the rest of the class didn’t understand the lecture to begin with
63. You know how to calculate specificity Yes
64. -positive predictive value Yes
65. -anion gap Yes
66. -you can’t balance your checkbook Yes
67. You don’t know what the weather was like for the past week
68. You don’t know what the weather is like right now
69. You actually talk in open ended questions Yes
70. DIC isn’t a slang term for the penis in your book Yes, disseminated intravascular coagulation
71. You think B-is a bad grade Yes
72. you have stressed about a pass/fail class Yes
73. You study during most of your meals Yes
74. You saw nothing abnormal about the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Yes
75. You draw all of the slides not already provided in the handouts Yes
76. -including the cartoons (humourous type)
77. Anatomy makes you hungry Yes
78. You would even consider saying “Ease back on my finger at your own pace”
79. You know the size of a RBC Yes, around 7 micrometer
80. -you don’t know the size of a football field Yes
81. Your eyesight has worsened by 10 pts or more in the last year
82. You have the library hours memorized
83. Hou have your own seat in the library Yes
84. You score more than 95 on the Epidemiology final
85. You own more than one white coat Yes
86. You have debated between giving up sleep or eating in order to find more time to study Yes
87. You started studying for boards more than 2 months in advance
88. You have never received a personal invitation to discuss your grades with the dean Yes
89. A tie is the only addition necessary to what you normally wear when you go to see patients
90. You wear scrubs to tests
91. You have made plans to study on a beach during vacation Yes
92. -you actually did Yes
93. You have a designated seat in lecture Yes
94. -You have ever asked someone to move from “your seat”
95. You sleep less than 4 hrs a night
96. -you think that is plenty
97. -you have thought about cutting back
98. You study more than 35 hrs outsid of class Yes
99. -you think you are a slackard Yes
100. You think everyone answers yes to most of these questions Yes

Scale
<20 You’re not in Med school.Go back to your party and leave us alone.We have work to do.
20-35 Either Med school is a breeze or you like the sound of “Senor doctor”
35-45 Gotta love that Primary Care
45-60 Well, I never really thought about MD/Phd, but now that you mention it…
60-75 Your social life is shot, might as well try to earn lots of money
75-90 Which surgery subspecialty did you say you liked?
90+ All hail, great Med School Nerd master.

Filed under: Comedy, Medicine

1 Glass per Day

Filed under: Comedy, Medicine

SuperHomeless

Me: It’s one degree F over here.
Brother: Yea, I heard.
Me: I hope those homeless people have shelter.
Brother: It’s survival of the fittest.
Me: What? That’s horrible.
Brother: Only the superhomesless can survive.

Filed under: Comedy

Neurosis Doesn’t End with Pre-meds

As a student entering medical school, you would think that all of your neurotic disorders would be left behind. Think again, because it shows up, my friend, in the form of “I think I have [current disease being studied]. I better go check with the Doc.” Yea, you think it’s funny now, just wait until that actually happens to you. For example, I had three episodes already.

“I swear that white speck looks like skin cancer.”
Our second medical case was a farmer with squamous carcinoma. For the entire week, I had this one white spot under my left eye. It’s not acne, and it doesn’t itch. So what did I do? I tried to get it out. Unfortunately for me, it was harder than expected. To my horror, I ended up rupturing a little blood vessel underneath. it swelled up and turned red and I freaked out. Now, I have a metastasizing cancer cell circulating in my blood stream.

“My lower back pain must be due to spinal stenosis.”
No seriously, I do have lower back pain on my right side since who knows when. It must be some congenital skeletal defects. I don’t really know. But when I was learning about herniated disc, I was convinced that I have a mild form of nerve entrapment syndrome. After palpating the back, I now think it’s due to muscles (probably one of the erector spinae). I don’t have scoliosis by the way, I checked.

“I threw away my supermarket mushrooms because they could be poisonous.”
The last medical case was about alpha-amanitin toxin derived from Amanita mushrooms. The patient picked these poisonous mushroom from the wood and had them for dinner. His liver failed and eventually died of multisystem failures. After this case, I ended up throwing away my dried mushrooms while I was making sphagetti pasta. I rather not have mushroom with my pasta than to die from the deadliest of all amatoxins due to some obscure reason on how it got mixed up in there.

This is not all, and I can assure you that there will be more to come.

Filed under: Academia, Comedy

Our Frisbee Team Sucks

Several of us, M1s, got together to form an intramural Frisbee team under the name “Loop of Henle”. Last Tuesday, we got our a$$es kicked by an undergrads team to the point where they pulled the Mercy Rule on us. It was sad.

Filed under: Comedy